How LVMH steers its houses into Digital Maturity

There is an enormous potential for synergies on many levels between the various organizations. However, the strength of the LVMH Group also lies in the fact that its Houses operate autonomously, to ensure rapid, effective and appropriate decisions and to encourage employees to show entrepreneurial spirit. 

SQLI is proud to collaborate with LVMH Group. We took on the challenge of combining the existing digital savviness with the unique heritage and savoir-faire of each House. We translated our approach into a coherent set of e-commerce and omnichannel guidelines, templates and educational materials, which help the LVMH Group coach its Houses into digital transformation. 

In this blog you’ll learn how to approach digital transformation for a family brand holding brands with different levels of digital maturity.  

Digital transformation at different levels of digital savvy? 

Determine the digital maturity! 

To find the best route to your destination, you first have to know where you are. When starting a new digital project, we start by determining the current digital maturity of your organization. 

Each maturity level has its own set of questions and challenges to address. Each step up adds unique knowledge and experience to your organization. Moving through the steps helps an organization grow and enriches its proposition to the customer.  

From digital ambition to roadmap to digital transformation

In the next step you set the ambition, taking into account these key ideas: 

• The digital ambition must be aligned with the overall ambition of the company. So for example, if you have a strong product driven organization and want to keep it that way, because that’s the source of your success, you may not want to evolve into a full-blown customer centric organization. The last step in the model is not necessarily the end goal. 
• Skipping steps is a challenge. This requires the right preparation, an agile mindset and a highly skilled team. Skipping steps also means you don’t get to take the learnings from that phase, so the risk of running into problems with basics is significant. 
• Going from one step to the next will require organizational change. The further you move in the model, the larger the organizational change will be. A digital department is not enough.

Good artists copy, great artists steal 

Of course we don’t condone actual stealing, but as Picasso famously put it: there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. If there are great examples on the market, why not let yourself get inspired by them? 

One obvious source is your direct competition, but there are many other sources to tap into: 

• In organizations with multiple brands in their portfolio, you can learn a lot from your sister brands. The more independent each brand operates, the better, as this means they will all develop their own best practices and there’s a diversity of examples to study. 
• Different types of product from the same brand can be in different stages of maturity. For example, in fashion, the children’s collections are often ahead of adult collections with digital sales.  
• Similarly, if your organization is active on a multinational level, you will find that some countries are ahead of others. One country may only sell five percent of the overall revenue online, while the other is already at thirty percent and can give you many valuable insights. Once you have found all the inspiration you need, you can then adapt these best practices to suit your own situation.